George Bizos: bulldog of the struggle

George Bizos, who has died at the age of 92, was born in Kirani, Greece, on November 15 1927. In 1941, at the age of 13, he and his father helped seven New Zealand soldiers escape the Nazi-occupied Greek mainland to Crete.

They were adrift for three days in a small fishing boat until being picked up by a British destroyer on its way to the Battle of Crete. After the battle it took Bizos and his father to Egypt, from where they were sent as refugees to SA.

They arrived in Johannesburg in the middle of a threatening demonstration against prime minister Jan Smuts by the pro-Nazi Ossewabrandwag for bringing the vuilgoed (rubbish) of Europe to SA.

Unable to speak English or Afrikaans, he couldn't attend school and spent his first two years working in a Greek cafe until he was rescued by a young teacher who helped him with his English and sent him to school.

After matriculating he studied law at Wits University, where he met fellow law student Mandela and got involved in student anti-apartheid politics. He joined the Johannesburg Bar in 1954 and rubbed shoulders with high-calibre lawyers including Duma Nokwe, Oliver Tambo, Sydney Kentridge and Joel Joffe, who later recruited him for the Rivonia Trial defence team.

He became Mandela's lifelong friend and lawyer, supporting Winnie Mandela and their two daughters wherever possible while Mandela was in jail.

When Mandela began talking to the apartheid government in the mid-'80s, Bizos relayed progress reports from him to an anxious ANC president Tambo in Lusaka, reassuring him that Mandela was not selling out the struggle.

After Mandela was released in 1990 and the ANC was unbanned, Bizos agreed to his request that he join the ANC's constitutional committee provided he didn't have to join the ANC, and helped draw up the interim constitution.

As Mandela's friend and lawyer he defended Winnie in 1991 when she was on trial for kidnapping and assaulting Stompie Moeketsi Seipei. He based his defence on the lie that she was in Brandfort at the time of Stompie's death and not in Soweto. He continued to insist this was the truth even after the Truth and Reconciliation Commission's final report concluded that it was a lie.

He was criticised for his homophobic defence of Winnie. He nearly destroyed Bishop Paul Verryn on the entirely bogus grounds that she had to rescue Stompie from depravities being committed on him and other young boys at the Methodist manse where Verryn lived. When confronted by a senior colleague, Bizos said he was acting under instructions from his client.

He said he never regretted defending her because he saw her as a victim of apartheid.

The jury will probably always be out on whether Bizos saved Mandela from the gallows by getting him to insert three words into his speech from the dock at the Rivonia Trial in 1964. What is certain is that only Bizos, a junior member of one of the most brilliant defence teams ever assembled, could have pulled this off.

Those he defended in more political trials than any other lawyer in the country remembered how, when he gave advice to them, it was always in a gentle, empathetic way that was utterly persuasive.

Mandela, who'd spent days crafting his marathon speech with its ringing declaration that he was "prepared to die", refused the entreaties of his team to change what they thought would come across as a challenge likely to be met with a death sentence.

"Could you add the words: 'if needs be', before you say that you are prepared to die?" asked Bizos. Mandela agreed.

"And I suppose those words are my contribution to the struggle," said Bizos years later.

He made another contribution during the trial that may have been equally crucial.

The defence lawyers all agreed that the Rivonia defendants should not testify for fear of what chief prosecutor Percy Yutar might do to them in cross-examination.

All of them except Bizos. He believed it would be in their interests to testify because then the judge, Quartus de Wet, would know them as human beings and find it "very difficult to hang them".

His colleagues thought he was dreaming.

In the event, although right up to sentencing the death sentence seemed inevitable, Bizos was proved right.

After Rivonia, Bizos's most memorable trial was the Delmas Treason Trial, in which 22 leaders of the United Democratic Front, including Mosiuoa Lekota, Popo Molefe and Moss Chikane, were charged with treason, terrorism and furthering the aims of banned organisations.

It lasted from 1985 to 1989 and produced one of the most classic confrontations in South African legal history between Bizos, the chief cross-examiner, and presiding judge Kees van Dijkhorst, a rigid, arrogant, authoritarian figure with an acute intelligence and a strong intolerance for lawyers like Bizos. His dogged, determined, indefatigable and rambling style got right up Van Dijkhorst's nose. At some point in the trial he seemed to go off the rails completely. The leader of the defence team, Arthur Chaskalson, said he thought Bizos had driven him mad.

There were so many sharp exchanges between Van Dijkhorst and Bizos that one of the defence team's grounds of appeal was that the nature and frequency of the judge's interventions were such as to create an unfair trial and identified 500 interventions from the bench, most of them while Bizos was cross-examining state witnesses.

As always, he was never impolite, but he never backed away from his commitment to make his point no matter what obstructions and diversions Van Dijkhorst put in his way.

He led the argument for leave to appeal based on these 500 interventions, which Van Dijkhorst insisted he go through one by one. This led to a memorable war of words between them. Came 4pm and Van Dijkhorst refused to adjourn. By 5pm the court stenographer was in tears. Court staff were getting noticeably agitated.

Determined to beat the judge at his own game, Bizos continued his way through the 500 interventions. At 7pm Chaskalson told him: "George, it's enough. Sit down."

Bizos replied, anything but sotto voce: "I'll carry on 'till midnight. I'm not going to let him wear me down."

In the end the appeal was granted and jail sentences of 10 years were overturned.

Apart from his unrelenting persistence, what annoyed many judges, picked for their loyalty to the apartheid state and hostility to the liberation movement, was that Bizos invariably destroyed the state's expert witnesses.

He wasn't flamboyant and he never performed for the gallery. He focused entirely on the judge. He never lost his cool and he refused to be sidetracked.

He wasn't flamboyant and he never performed for the gallery. He focused entirely on the judge

When his cross-examination of an expert witness in the Little Rivonia Trial, in which he defended Mac Maharaj and other ANC leaders running the underground in the absence of those in exile or jail, seemed to be going too well, the prosecution tried to throw him off course with allegations that were nowhere in the record that the accused had set up an execution squad.

Bizos recognised this as a ploy to rattle him. It certainly rattled the accused, who knew that if it could be shown they'd taken a decision to kill people then they'd hang. But he refused to bite and stuck to the issues before the court.

There were few expert witnesses for the state who survived his cross-examination. Future deputy police commissioner Andre Pruis, a PhD from the University of the Free State who was brought to the Delmas trial by the state as an expert in revolutionary theory, was not one of them.

He was there to show that the UDF was a textbook copy of revolutionary theory as espoused by the Marxist theorist of Latin American revolution, Regis Debray. Unbeknown to Pruis - but recently revealed to Bizos by Wits University politics professor Tom Lodge - was that Debray had changed his theory in a new, little-known book he wrote after eight years in a Bolivian jail.

Giving nothing away Bizos pinned Pruis down to his absolute reliance on Debray. Had he read everything by him, Bizos inquired? Yes, replied Pruis.

What about this, he asked, producing Debray's latest offering with a flourish.

This so completely destroyed Pruis as an expert witness that when his collapse inevitably came, Van Dijkhorst said he supposed the court could draw a line through all his evidence.

It was one of the most ruthless and complete demolitions of an expert state witness seen in an apartheid political trial.

Bizos had a formidable reputation, not least among the security police, who hated him. The Rand Daily Mail ran a front-page report that tears rolled down the face of a security policeman while being cross- examined by Bizos in a Terrorism Act trial.

The security police complained furiously about what they saw as an affront. When the Mail asked Bizos, he said that as much as he would have liked to reduce a security policeman to tears, this had not happened.

He attracted the ire of the apartheid regime and was the nemesis of the security establishment. Justice minister John Vorster pointedly warned him on one occasion that his rope was getting shorter.

Bizos later revealed that "dirty tricks" were perpetrated against him and his family but he'd never taken any special security measures. "If they want to get you, they'll get you," he said.

In 2004 he risked the wrath of the Thabo Mbeki government, not to mention Robert Mugabe's goons, when he went to Harare to defend Morgan Tsvangirai, leader of the main opposition party in Zimbabwe, the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), who was charged with planning a coup d'etat before the 2002 general elections.

This was a very unpopular thing to do in the time of the Mbeki regime, which was determined to cover up serious human rights abuses under Mugabe. And travelling to Harare to defend such a sworn enemy of Mugabe, whose vicious campaign of terror against supporters of the MDC was at its height, took no small amount of courage.

As, of course, did confronting the open hostility of the South African security branch when he represented the families of those killed in police detention, including Ahmed Timol in 1971 and Steve Biko in 1977.

This led to the 1989 film based on Andre Brink's book, A Dry White Season, starring Marlon Brando as Sydney Kentridge, who was the Biko family's chief legal representative at the inquest and did most of the cross-examining.

Bizos was consulted on the script and his influence in Brando's performance was evident. He attended the premiere in a New York theatre full of exiled anti-apartheid activists who cheered when the character played by Brando revealed in a dramatic courtroom scene that a witness had been beaten by the police. An activist shouted: "George! That's how George does it!"

He led the cross-examination on behalf of the Aggett family in the 1982 inquest into the death in detention of Neil Aggett, who was found hanged in his cell in John Vorster Square. He coined the term "induced suicide", arguing that Aggett's suicide was induced by ill treatment at the hands of the security police.

He called 10 former detainees to testify about Aggett's treatment under interrogation, singled out two security policemen and demanded they be charged with culpable homicide. The magistrate exonerated the police of any blame.

At the Truth and Reconciliation Commission he opposed applications for amnesty on behalf of the Biko, Chris Hani, Matthew Goniwe, Fort Calata, Sparrow Mkhonto, Sicelo Mhlauli and the Slovo and Schoon families.

On behalf of the Legal Resources Centre, where he worked from 1991 until well into his 80s, he opposed Eugene de Kock's bid for amnesty, arguing that although he'd told the truth to the amnesty committee, he opposed his application because he'd killed for private gain.

He argued that inconsistencies in the amnesty process did not invalidate it.

"Had it not been for amnesty there would have been no settlement," he said. "There would have been civil war."

He always felt deeply the lasting pain apartheid inflicted on those he defended. In court, faced with graphic evidence of torture and brutality, he kept a tight hold on his emotions, remaining inscrutable and focused. Outside, he frequently let the tears roll down. A gregarious, profoundly social being, he found solace with his extraordinarily wide circle of friends and in tending his beloved vegetable garden, most of whose produce he gave to clients in need.

He is survived by three sons. Arethe, known as "Rita", his wife of more than 50 years, died in 2017.

Love-struck  on a tram

In his last book, 65 Years of Friendship (Penguin Random House, 2017), Bizos describes meeting Arethe Daflos, the love of his life:

“I first saw Arethe on the red-and-white city tram that cheerfully rattled its way eastwards from the city centre along Main Street towards Bezuidenhout Valley. She was seated on the near-empty upper deck and, although there were plenty of other seats available, I took the one next to hers, prompting a charismatic blush that emphasised the sea-green of her eyes …

“Near the end of the year I got caught in one of those summer thunderstorms into which the heat of the day collapses on the Highveld. I arrived soaked at Dawe Street. Arethe pulled me into the carpeted hallway and, with a tenderness that I had never known, towelled my head and shoulders dry. When she had finished, we kissed. It was the end of eight years of loneliness and the beginning of a loving relationship that has lasted over half a century and produced three sons and six grandchildren.”